Do you spend considerable time trying to stop spammers joining your forum? Or do you simply just let them join and then ban them on their first spam message?

It’s hard to know which way to go.  Either way, there is time spent on filtering these online pests.

I recently came across a site called Stop Forum Spam and you can enter the ip address of a new member to see if that same person has been registering with multiple forums over a short period of time. I’ve found it’s taken the guesswork out for me and I can ban them straight off. I usually include an email message with the rejection message with any I’m not sure about banning, i.e. if there’s not sufficient evidence that they might be a spammer, just so I’m not rejecting anyone genuine, but for the most part, it helps me determine the spammers from genuine members.

Regular readers will know I’ve been doing posts about various social networks. There’s a lot of good things about them but there are some things you need to be careful about too.

I was reading SpeakerNet News recently and saw a quote about the use of Facebook and Twitter and how you conduct yourself there. Now, may I say, that I think it is always important to conduct yourself professionally, or in the manner you would always want to be perceived.  No use in behaving one way in one place and different in another and not think anyone will notice.  They will.

Anyway, let me share with you what Rita Makana Risser has to say:

Peter Shankman reports on a speaker who twittered on his way to speak to FedEx in Memphis about how he would die if he had to live there. He showed up to a hostile audience! Be aware that what might seem cute or funny to your pals can be an insult to your audience or meeting planners. It might be a good idea to limit posts on politics to groups that share your political views. A political posting on Facebook by one of my friends for all her friends to see caused quite a bit of discussion ­ and not the good kind. Whether or not you want to use Facebook for business purposes, meeting planners and corporate types are looking at us wherever we show up, and making decisions based on what we post. You can have a business page on Facebook as well as a personal page, and that’s what I have done. Your personal page is for real friends and family; the business one is for everyone else.

I think what Rita says makes a lot of sense, don’t you?

Twitter, Facebook, behaviour, social networking

I wanted to go ask a specific question the other day on two writer’s forums I belong to but both were closed. Both were with Ning and I was in a fix because I wanted to post my question now!  So, what should I do?

• I posted at Twitter

• I sent an email to another forum

• I did some research at Google

• I kept revisiting the Ning site waiting for it to open again.

What do you do when you can’t get into the group you want to participate in?

Perhaps it’s the mood I’m in but there are some things that really irk me on the web.  Not only that but I suspect they annoy other people too and may be the reason why some people don’t get the signups or responses they’re looking for.

Today it was a mom’s membership website – I wanted to join as a member sometime ago but couldn’t get past their sign up process so gave up and forgot about it. Today I get a reminder to say I hadn’t completed the process so I went back to try and work out why I couldn’t complete my registration.

Ahhh, now I remember.  Because my Australian postcode does not fit their requirements for a zipcode it won’t accept it and therefore will not allow me to complete my registration.  I wrote back to them and asked them if they really want members outside their own country?

Make a note – if you want signups on your form for your website then make sure it allows people from all countries to sign up – not just your own!

Further to my recent posts about joining a yahoogroup and being a member, the information would not be complete without something on being a moderator or owner of a group.

Anyone can start up a yahoogroup for any reason.  You just have to do a search to find out that the topics are so varied and memberships range from 1 or 2 people to thousands of people.  And the activity of these groups can range to only a few messages a month to hundreds of messages in one day.  But the good thing is that this doesn’t happen overnight, it takes time to grow your group and for the activity to develop.

I’ll give you examples of groups I’ve set up to give you some ideas for your own group.

I have a family group that is set to private which means it’s only open to those I invite or add to the group – no-one else can apply to join. So my parents, siblings, nephews and nieces can join in the chatter to one another without having to know everyone’s email address. What I haven’t shared in previous posts is that you can literally send one email and it will go out to a group of however many is in the group. So you can hit reply or send to mygroup@yahoogroups.com and all members of that group will receive your email.

Another group I set up was for a group of women who do fundraising and support each in a closed forum – again no-one can join unless invited or added to the group and generally the group isn’t advertised on the yahoogroups directory.

Some groups I’ve joined are announcement only lists – there isn’t any actual discussion that takes place, just information that is disseminated to the members. So you could choose to set up a group for a newsletter for example and many have.

Most groups I belong to are advertised in the yahoogroups directory and open to anyone to join, although membership is generally approved first and often new members might be moderated until they’ve settled into the culture of the group, or proven they aren’t spammers.

Because some groups are very large and lots of messages come through day and night, list owners can elect to have some members set up as co-moderators and when you log into a group where you can see the members, the owners and moderators are identified by a blue or gold crown next to their yahoo ID in the member’s list of any group.

When you go to set up a new group you are encouraged to search through existing categories first to find a home for your new group at http://groups.yahoo.com/start.    Once you’ve found the right category then you click on ‘Place My Group Here’.  Now you need to decide on a name for your group, if you haven’t already and a shortened version for the email address. For example I created the Virtual Assistants International Group and the shortened version is vaig@yahoogroups.com for the address.  I then gave it a description – don’t worry if you don’t have it all correct as you can update the description later.

You will be advised if the name or address you’ve chosen is available and then you can proceed further to select your yahoo profile to link to the group.

Now, you can start exploring all the facilities available for your group.  I’ll share more in a later post.

As a moderator of a few yahoogroup forums I get frequent requests for me to remove members, update their email addresses, change their email notifications and so on.  Realistically I couldn’t do this for everyone – with over 2,000 participants in the forums I moderate (or own) it would become a fulltime job in itself – an unpaid one.  I try to educate them periodically on things they can do to help themselves, but it seems that sometimes it still doesn’t click – especially if they’ve not participated in online forums before.

Below is an email I sent to one of my groups explaining how their membership works and I’ve added it here to assist anyone else trying to learn how it can work for them.

Everyone owns their own account at yahoogroups.com.  If I subscribed you because you belong to the ACS team, you would have received a welcome message via yahoogroups explaining how it works.  Some groups (like mine) might have a series of emails that come through, to explain how the list works and possibly send some files as well.

To login to yahoogroups.com, use the email address you were registered with, or the one you are receiving at and enter your password. If you do not know your password, then you need to click on ‘forgot password’ so yahoogroups can regenerate that for you – your moderator cannot do it.  If that doesn’t work for you they can log in and ask it to regenerate and I have done this on occasions for some and that usually resolves it.  If you don’t receive the information you need then you do need to contact yahoogroups at http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/groups/original/forms_index.html

At the bottom of every email you’ll find links to Visit Your Group, Change Settings via the Web, or Unsubscribe.

Once you have logged in, you’ll see a blue box on the left that says ‘View Groups‘ and to the right of that ‘Edit My Groups’ (see figure below).  Click on Edit My Groups and then change your settings from Individual emails to nomail, daily digest or whatever suits you.  You’ll need to do this for each group you belong to but if the setting is to be the same for all you can do it simply in one hit rather than individually for each group from this screen.  For the moderator to do it they have to login as a moderator and then search through each group to find you and this does take time.  At the centre of the screen you’ll see a link for ‘Go to my Email Preferences’ which is where you can add more email addresses or change them.  You can have several addresses listed to send from but you can only choose one to receive at.  I have about 6 or 7 addresses listed on my yahoogroups account and might have a different address listed for receiving for each forum I belong to.

It really is important for you to become familiar with anything you use on the web.  I belong to 20 groups here at yahoogroups and some are set to nomail and some to individual email.  I wouldn’t expect the moderators of those groups to manage my account for me and it’s important that you don’t either.  So please take the time to explore how yahoogroups works and you’ll find that you can easily make changes and even join more groups if you wish.

Finally, if you are going on leave for a period of time, set your yahoogroups to ‘nomail’ so that your autoresponder does not keep coming back to the moderators. It is really very annoying for every message that is posted to receive an autoresponder advising you’re not available.

I hope this helps everyone to understand a little more about how yahoogroups works.

I sometimes wonder what goes on in the minds of other people when participating in chat forums.

I belong to a lot of email based business network forums, mainly through yahoogroups.  It seems to me there are 3 types of people who participate in these forums.

1.  The person who replies and leaves all of the previous email(s) and so we get a trail of messages repeated over and over again, especially if others add to it.  The poor people on daily digest, or on dialup – having to pay for the download of repeated messages.  These people either don’t really understand what it’s all about, or perhaps they are just plain lazy – maybe they don’t even think.

2.  The opposite (extreme) – deleting everything, even what they are responding to, and thereby leaving others guessing what it was they were responding to. The subject heading doesn’t always give a clue, particularly if it’s gone off topic.  These people are too pedantic – not everyone is on your wave length.

3.  The person who does trim the email, leaving enough so that others can see what is being responded or added to – this is the preferred option and keeps things running smoothly.

Actually, there are others.

4. The lurker – those who read everything, devour what info they can and possibly apply it, but give nothing of themselves and don’t contribute back to the group.  These are the takers.

5,  The responder – to everything. They have to have a word about everything that is taking place, even responding with just ‘thank you’.  Some of these replies just aren’t needed, at least via the forum – you can always email the person direct.  We all get enough email as it is, don’t you think?

I hadn’t really thought about what day it was just recently but then the jokes started coming in – some quite elaborate. My radio station got outted by an IT guy early in their hoax.

And the blogger’s forum I belong to made members feel like they’d become dyslexic or that they’d typed the wrong words – took me a few seconds to realise why that might be happening. Very disorienting and strange to read.

I particularly loved these ones!

Baby Calf grows inside Award-Winning Giant Pumpkin

LinkedIn to End Free Service

If you know of others, why not share them here?

Addendum:  Here are some more

gDay™ with MATE™

Yahoo 7 News has a list too

If you blog, has it occurred to you to mix and mingle with like minded people via the blogging forums?

In my early blogging days I joined some blogging communities but they seemed to be more about visiting each other’s blogs and building up the visitor stats but no real connection or interaction took place and the forums in those days were pretty much about ‘look at me, look at my blog’.  Comments were few and far between, as were subscribers.  Increasing counts mean little if nothing else comes with it.

Late last year I was invited to join the Aussie Bloggers Forum and because I knew some of the people involved I joined. Now here was a forum that was more along the lines of what I would like to participate in and I’ve been an active member ever since and recently became a moderator there. The members are great, some of them in the Top 100 Aussie blogger’s list and many others from around the world (ex-pat Aussies) and/or new bloggers. There is always so much to learn from others about various aspects of blogging.

And just this week I decided I really should look to see what other blogging forums are out there.  In my search I came across Bloggeries.  I did look at others but this one has a good number of members and seems quite active so I joined.

If you’re new at blogging, or perhaps you aren’t new but feel ‘alone’ then joining a blogger’s forum is a great way to get to know others, learn to increase your skill as a blogger and even pick up a few new visitors and comments along the way.

The ‘paperless’ office is pretty much a joke these days. Email seems to generate much more of it, but even if we don’t print it off, we still have lots to read and catch up on – if we want to keep up to date with the world. The world has grown ‘smaller’ but with it the amount of stuff we want to know and read has increased considerably. This leads us to being on lots and lots of lists and it’s easy to lose control of what we’ve subscribed to and where those things are on the web.

I started subscribing to lists back in 1997 or perhaps even earlier, definitely before spam became a problem and so every man and his dog seemed to end up with my address as it got passed or sold from one person to another. Of course spam legislations and other rulings now make that a ‘no no’ but it doesn’t change what has taken place in the past. The end result is that people tend to get an email address that they use for subscriptions only and then change it if the spam gets too much. And that’s where a new challenge comes – to the owners of the lists you want to stay on.

I frequently get emails from people asking me to change their details on my, or my clients’ broadcast lists. Or autoresponders that say ‘Johnnie doesn’t use this address anymore, please update your file to xxxx’. I guess that seems fair enough to the owner of that address but what about the list owner when they get this multiple times? Suddenly they’re faced with having to set aside time to update addresses on their lists.  Not to mention all the old addresses that need culling.

Many lists I belong to (and those I use) allow you to click on a link and update the listing yourself and I encourage you to do so.  Or if you want to get off a list, use the Cancel link rather than emailing the people who own the list to ask them to remove you – much less time and keystrokes involved for all.  And it’s easier.

And if you’re sick of changing addresses constantly, consider using a good spam filter online and then add the addresses of the lists you want to stay on, to the safe list so they can get through.  I use spamarrest and this has worked well for me for several years now.  KMT